1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for navigation and position sensing, and, more particularly, to miniaturized devices for performing inertial measurement and inertial navigation sensing.
2. Description of Related Art
It is known that individual commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) devices do not achieve tactical-grade levels of performance when used in inertial measurement units (IMUs). The process of improving the performance of a navigation system with new or advanced algorithms, the ability to measure and assess the improvements, and finally the ability to embed the new algorithms within the embedded software architecture and measure the improved performance is a complex process. The process to create, test, measure the improvements, implement the improvements, and test the results to satisfy the requirements for different instruments is even more complex. The ability to create an interface between the IMU with its embedded array of sensors, the navigation filters, multiple sensors that aid in navigation accuracy that feed them is a major challenge. The interface must be able to operate between the sensors and the computation environment, i.e., laptop, MATLAB/Simulink, C++ algorithms, and the algorithm suite must be able to operate within a real-time structure for testing and evaluation.
It would thus be desirable to provide an improved IMU having tactical-grade performance levels.